Veggie-Loving Parents Make Nutrition a Family Affair

When it comes to eating, the Gerson boys can make most parents feel as if they must be doing something wrong.

At 9, Eliot knows how to draw a detailed food pyramid, sketching out the recommended servings of cereals, fruits and vegetables and the very few servings of sweets and fats. Then he adds, deadpan, “I’d prefer a fresh, juicy white peach to a strawberry ice cream.” Scott is 5, and while he hankers for gummy candies, he also counts broccoli and spinach among his favorite foods. Many children his age can read, but not many routinely read the nutrition labels on boxes and cans at the supermarket, as Scott and Eliot do.

Credit--or blame--their parents, Jon and Susan Gerson, who consciously have conditioned them to crave fresh fruits and vegetables the way other kids hunger for processed, nitrate-laden hot dogs and deep-fried chicken nuggets. Junk food rarely enters their house, which is in the Washington suburb of Kensington, Md.

Refrigerator bins are loaded with veggies green and yellow and red. Six varieties of apples nestle beside nectarines, apricots and kiwis in the big wooden bowl on the kitchen counter. The pantry is stocked with cans of black olives and chickpeas for snacking. The frozen enchiladas are organic vegetarian.

“If the choice is fries or beans, most kids will choose fries. But if I only put out choices that I want them to eat, I don’t have to worry,” says Susan of her philosophy that kids will eventually eat what is put in front of them.

“You have to ask yourself,” she says, “at what point do kids reject them? Or do parents stop serving them first?”

That the Gersons’ approach seems to have worked is nothing short of awe-inspiring to any otherwise intelligent adult who has ever engaged in a battle to get a waist-high person to just taste something that smacks of produce. But even relative paragons of gastronomic virtue such as the Gersons live in the same fat- and sugar-sotted world as the rest of us. It’s just that most people live there full time; the Gersons are mere tourists in Sugarland.

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Whether or not young children are in the house, the eating habits of most Americans would be graded, at best, “needs improvement.”

It’s not for lack of information. The Agriculture Department has designed the food pyramid as a guide to daily eating. Nutrition groups have built advertising campaigns urging us to eat the right things.

But “nobody wants to eat food because it’s good for them,” Washington dietitian Katherine Tallmadge says. “People eat because something tastes good.” And so, a decade after the food pyramid made its debut, six in 10 American adults are overweight, and a quarter are considered obese. One child in eight weighs too much.

In some ways it’s easier to find nutritious food. Many supermarkets carry exotic fruits, and even fast-food restaurants have salad bars. But there are more temptations than there used to be, and they come in bigger sizes. Just try to find a 6-ounce bottle of soda, common only three or four decades ago. Now vending machines routinely dispense 20-ounce bottles.

Part of the allure is genetic. Humans are born with a sweet tooth: In one study, the faces of infants fed chocolate for the first time lit up as if they were discovering joy itself. Given green beans, they grimaced with a distinct yuck. Anthropologists say such reactions are traceable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors, who used taste to distinguish between bitter plants that might be poisonous and high-sugar foods that provided energy. Now the only hunting and gathering we do is from a supermarket shelf jammed with choices and calories.

“For the first time in our evolution as human beings, a lot of food is easily available,” says Tallmadge. “We don’t have to go out and catch it, skin it or forage for it. And it’s really delicious. It’s sweet and salty and fatty. And we’re eating larger portions.”

What is a parent to do? Banning junk food outright doesn’t work. Parents who treat sweets like controlled substances often end up with children who eventually binge, studies have concluded. But growing research on taste preferences suggests children can learn to like vegetables. Leann Birch, a Pennsylvania State University researcher who has studied finicky eaters--children who adamantly stick to the same one or two foods, day after day--says it takes eight to 10 exposures to a vegetable before children overcome their innate fear of new foods and try it.

Nutritionists say the lesson is to be persistent and patient and not get too hung up on rules that can rob eating of its fun.

“Twenty or 30 years ago there was a norm for family meals,” says Ellyn Satter, author of “Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family.” “The whistle blew at 6, and everybody went home. Now there’s soccer practice at 6. The norm is absolutely gone. What has come forward to replace it is a bunch of rules. The food guide pyramid is so meticulous overall that the message to the public is rigidity and avoidance.

“People today have all-or-nothing, sink-or-swim attitudes about food. They feel if it’s enjoyable, it can’t be good for them. That takes all the joy, all the motivation, all the reward out of family meals.”

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The Gersons somehow make vegetables and fruits seem both virtuous and amusing. Dessert becomes a game, as the boys close their eyes and try to guess what fruit their dad has popped into their mouths. On family outings, the Gersons visit organic farms to pick berries and talk to soybean farmers who make tofu. Cherry tomatoes are planted alongside the patio for the boys to snack on when shooting hoops. On their weekly boys’ night out, father and sons favor a Mongolian restaurant where diners select a meat and fresh vegetables, then watch them being sauteed and scooped into a bowl.

The Gersons aren’t focused exclusively on nutrition. Eating is not just eating; it’s part of a developed philosophy on the rearing of high achievers. Susan, after all, is a child psychologist. Jon’s mother was one, too.

“It’s consistency, across the board,” says Jon, “whether it’s using car seats and safety belts, bedtime by 8, exercising tight control over the TV, having no weapons as toys and watching what gets eaten. They all fit together in setting a kid up to be successful in school and in his behavior and getting the habits ingrained early so they feel more comfortable.”

The couple’s approach is subtle. They don’t make their sons clean their plates or order them to eat anything they don’t like. It would seem almost laissez-faire, but a close inspection of their refrigerator and pantry reveals how carefully each food item is selected.

The applesauce is unsweetened. The microwaveable wraps are stuffed with tofu and carrots. A cardboard pint of what appears to be ice cream turns out to be sorbet. Sticks of string cheese are low fat. Ground meat for chili and spaghetti sauce is turkey, not beef. Juice is 100% juice. Fruit is purposely kept in sight on the countertop instead of hidden in the refrigerator so the boys can grab a piece in passing.

Still, the Gersons try not to be doctrinaire. There are foods that simply cannot be avoided, maybe even shouldn’t be avoided, and situations in which the regime goes by the wayside. They go to restaurants sometimes. When other children have birthday parties, the Gerson boys get cake, too.

“If you take them to Ocean City”--a Maryland beach resort--”you can’t say they can’t eat what they see all around them,” Susan says. “There’s nothing good to eat in Ocean City. You’d be hard-pressed to find a vegetable. So you give in to it and have fun.”

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Maybe, as teens, the Gerson boys will become rebellious chocoholics. Nutrition experts say the Gersons seem to be doing the right thing, not forbidding or stigmatizing any particular foods, but there are always risks. “When parents are too fanatical, it can translate to eating disorders with children,” says Tallmadge, the dietitian.

And even for the Gersons, not every day is a piece of cake. Peer pressure to eat certain foods can get in the way. So can the stress of daily life, when every gene seems to cry out for a candy bar to grease the skids. You give in and use what works.

Take the trail of M&Ms; and gummy candies that Jon admits he has on occasion planted in a long, winding line up the stairs into the bathroom, ending at the tub’s faucet so the boys have to climb in to reach the last one. It causes major issues to disappear with one shot of sugar.

But Jon’s pride in his child management skills was deflated the day Eliot came home from school with a note from his teacher. “We need to talk about the use of sweets as an incentive for behavior,” she wrote.

Busted.